Precision

Brussels heard a technical distinction on Monday. The region heard something it remembers.

Ngadhnjim Brovina | 8 September 2026

On the evening Ratko Mladić was buried, the European Commission's spokesperson told the Brussels press room: "We heard that a funeral with state honours was planned, but that did not happen." Journalists asked on what basis, when state institutions, the army, ministers and the state flag had all been part of the send-off. The answer was that it is for Serbia to decide how to organise a funeral, and that the Commission had stated its position clearly.

People in Brussels can afford to hear that as a distinction, between a funeral organised by the state and a funeral the state attended, carried, saluted and fired over. People in Bosnia and Kosovo hear something else. They remember what happened the last time Europe became precise about words while Belgrade was precise about power.

Nobody in the Commission disputed the aircraft, the Serbian Army detail on the apron, the five ministers in the church or the three volleys at the grave. What was disputed was the category those facts belonged to. Europe has done this before. When it does not intend to act, it rarely says so. It finds a category into which the thing everyone saw does not quite fit, and stands behind the category. Why Brussels was so anxious, on that of all evenings, to find one is something the region can answer from memory.

The record is not abstract. In June 1991, as Yugoslavia broke, a European foreign minister speaking for the Community announced that the hour of Europe had come. The instruments that followed were mostly the United Nations', but Europe was hardly standing outside them: Britain and France sat on the Security Council, and European states supplied much of the peacekeeping force and most of the diplomacy around it. The arms embargo of September 1991 was even-handed in text; on the ground it left those defending Sarajevo denied anything close to equal access to arms while facing an army that had inherited the arsenals of a federal state. A safe area was a place where people had been told, in the language of international law, that they were under protection. The dual key over air power meant that whenever force might have mattered, someone could explain why it could not yet be used, and by 1995 the United Nations' half of that key was in the hands of a French general. Srebrenica had been a safe area for two years when July 1995 came. People there had been told what the designation meant. They found out what it was worth on the day protection was required, while the designation stayed on paper and the men and boys were taken away.

No formulation ended the wars. Bosnia was forced toward its end in the late summer of 1995, when NATO aircraft struck the positions that four years of process had left untouched, American forces flying about two thirds of the sorties, while Croatian and Bosnian offensives changed the map on the ground; the settlement was then written at an American air base. Kosovo ended in 1999 because a NATO threat became a NATO campaign, with British and other European forces flying in it, and the threat had become real because Washington had decided it would be. European diplomacy has had coercive weight in this region exactly when the United States stood behind it. That is the fact Europeans least enjoy admitting about their own decade, and we do not enjoy it much either.

It is fair to say that Europe's common foreign-policy machinery was rudimentary then, that the Union itself did not yet exist in 1991, and that comparisons across thirty years flatter nobody. That is the concession. It is also the difficulty. The Union now has a foreign service and a High Representative, an enlargement commissioner who cancelled her visit, and on the day a candidate state's army fired over a genocide convict, the instrument it reached for was the one the Community had in 1991.

What has changed is the other half of the arrangement. In 1995 and 1999 Belgrade could read Europe's hesitation and still had to read Washington's intentions. This week the one document we have found from the United States government on the funeral is a security alert from its Belgrade embassy, giving the timetable for Dom Vojske, St Luke's and Topčider and advising citizens to expect crowds. Four members of Congress objected. From the State Department and the White House, at the time of writing, nothing. Serbia's president called the funeral an emotional outpouring that had "nothing to do" with whether his government approved it, and told the crowds they were answering Western pressure. For thirty years people in this region could at least assume that if Europe equivocated long enough, Washington would eventually draw the line for it. That assumption is no longer safe, and Belgrade knows it before we do.

We are not saying a new war is being prepared. We are saying that one dangerous part of the old environment has returned, European hesitation without a visible American backstop, and that Belgrade has spent a week finding out what follows from it.

Europe is entitled to call Monday whatever it likes; the vocabulary belongs to Brussels. The consequences of getting these distinctions wrong have never belonged to Brussels alone. In the 1990s they were paid in Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Vukovar and Kosovo. That is why, when weakness is presented to this region as precision, some of us recognise it before Europe does.